Terry's Texas Rangers — Key Ideas to Explore

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In Category - Modern Nations

Authors: Giles, L. B., 1841- Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2015 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Confederate States of America. Army. Texas Cavalry Regiment, 8th; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Regimental histories -- Texas Cavalry -- 8th Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 22,788

Reading time 100 min

Text sections 3

The catalog record for Terry's Texas Rangers — Key Ideas to Explore provides practical reading context through 22,788 words, 1 hr 40 min estimated reading time, and 3 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 17.8 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Confederate States of America. Army. Texas Cavalry Regiment, 8th,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #48103

L. B. Giles's memoir of the 8th Texas Cavalry recounts the regiment's Civil War service through personal observation, focusing on marches, skirmishes, and the aftermath of battles like Chickamauga, with a structure that moves between unit movements and intimate scenes.

Editorial Edition Score 4.5/5

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg48103

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EMBLY AND ORGANIZATION OF THE REGIMENT.

When in 1861 it became evident that war between the sections was inevitable and imminent, B. F. Terry, a sugar planter of Fort Bend county, and Thomas S. Lubbock, of Houston, determined to be in the fight from the start, hurried to Virginia, at their own expense, where they participated in the first battle of Manassas, rendering distinguished services as scouts before the action and in pursuit of the routed enemy afterward. Later the War Department gave them authority to recruit a regiment of Texans for mounted service in Virginia. Returning to Texas they at once issued a call for volunteers.

The conditions were exacting. Each man must furnish his own arms and equipment--a gun of some sort, Colt’s repeating pistol, a saddle, bridle and blanket. Notwithstanding these requirements, the response was so prompt that in less than thirty days the ten companies were on their way to the rendezvous at Houston. Some of the companies had the full complement of one hundred men, rank and file, and in a few more days all would have been full. Probably two or more regiments could have been raised at that time if the call had been made.

The personnel was of the very highest. Sons of leading families, many of them college graduates, professional men, merchants, stockmen, and farmers, served in the ranks as privates, all young, in their teens and early twenties. Rank was scarcely considered. The supreme desire was to get into the war in a crack cavalry regiment.

Since I write without data and from memory only, I must necessarily deal more particularly with the company of which I was a member, known as Company D in the regimental organization. It was recruited largely from Bastrop, with contingents from Hays, Travis and Burleson counties. This organization, full at the beginning, always one of the largest for duty, sustained the greatest loss in killed of all the companies of the regiment. The first officers elected were:

Captain, Stephen C. Ferrell. First Lieutenant, Charles L. Morgan. Second Lieutenant, Jesse W. Burdett. Second Lieutenant, William R. Doak.

The assembly for the company was to be in the town of Bastrop, and notice was given that on a certain morning the march would begin. The men from the adjoining counties reached Bastrop the night before.

It was a bright, sunny August morning. The people, _en masse_, turned out to bid us good-by. Men, women, children, with tears in their eyes, said, “God bless you!” when they clasped our hands as we stood in line. This painful ordeal over, we mounted and rode away on what we believed was a few months’ adventure.

Alleyton, sixty miles away, then the terminus of the railroad, was reached without any very exciting adventures. We sent our horses back home and took the train for Houston. The trains were then run to Harrisburg, but we were dumped off in the prairie at Pierce Junction to await a train from Columbia. The hours passed, and the night. We slept little on account of the mosquitoes, which were more numerous and voracious than any I ever met elsewhere. Next morning, as there was still no train, we walked into Houston, a distance of nine miles, pushing by hand the freight car with our saddles and baggage. Here we went into camp in an old warehouse and met some of the other companies.

From McLennan and adjoining counties Captain Thos. Harrison led a company which became Company A. Captain John A. Wharton had a full company raised chiefly in Brazoria and Matagorda counties. It became Company B in the organization and continued the largest in enlistment. Companies C, commanded by Mark Evans; E, by L. N. Rayburn; and I, led by J. G. Jones, were recruited in Gonzales and surrounding counties. Many of these were stockmen and expert horsemen. Company F was from Fayette and commanded by Louis M. Strobel. Company G was from Bexar and Goliad counties. Its first captain was W. Y. Houston. Company H was from Fort Bend county chiefly, and commanded by John T. Holt. Company K, Captain John G. Walker, was from Harris and Montgomery counties, and was full. The word “chiefly” ought to be used in telling where the companies were recruited, for all of them had men from several counties. Here, too, on the 9th of September we were “mustered in,” swearing to serve “so long as this war shall last.”

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L. B. Giles's account of Terry's Texas Rangers opens not with a battle cry but with a confession of limitation. In the introduction, he admits to feeling a "lack of ability" and notes that a complete history is impossible because "the necessary data can hardly be procured." Instead, he writes at the request of a former comrade, aiming to supply his children and grandchildren with "some knowledge, however imperfect." This modest framing shapes the narrative that follows: a memoir that moves between broad campaign summaries and sharply observed moments, such as a solitary ride through Chickamauga's battlefield where "the air was freighted with a horrible odor."

Structure: Campaigns and Personal Digressions

The book's table of contents lists sixteen chapters, each tied to a specific campaign or event—"Shiloh," "Chickamauga," "Wheeler's Great Raid"—suggesting a chronological military history. Yet the excerpts reveal a looser structure. Giles frequently interrupts the march narrative with personal digressions: a lost ride in the dark, a conversation with a wounded soldier, a night spent with comrades who "had sacks of bread and bacon." These pauses give the text a dual rhythm—the forward pressure of troop movements and the stillness of aftermath. The chapter on Chickamauga, for instance, devotes much of its space not to the battle itself but to a solitary journey afterward, where Giles encounters the dead and dying. This structural choice emphasizes the gaps between official actions, the moments when the individual soldier confronts the war's cost.

Recurring Images: The Battlefield After Dark

Giles returns repeatedly to scenes of night on a battlefield. In the Chickamauga excerpt, he describes riding through "Chickamauga's gloomy woods" after dark, guided only by a distant light. The moon rises, but it reveals "wreck and ruin everywhere": maimed horses, broken gun carriages, and the debris of war. The wounded call out from the shadows, asking for water or to be turned over. This image—the battlefield at night, stripped of the day's drama—recurs as a kind of signature. It is a space where the official narrative of victory or defeat gives way to sensory details: the "horrible odor," the sound of a horse's footfalls, the voices of men who "had struggled while there was strength." Giles uses these nocturnal scenes to register what daylight battles obscure.

Movement Between Scenes: The Lone Rider

A distinctive pattern in the excerpts is the sudden shift from the collective to the solitary. Giles often separates himself from the regiment to travel alone, delivering messages or searching for the command. These journeys become set pieces. In the Chickamauga chapter, he rides alone through the battlefield, gets lost, and eventually finds a campfire where surgeons sit on a porch. A "slender girl" directs him to Lee and Gordon's mill. The next morning, he meets two comrades and learns they have been cooking for the company, cut off from the fighting. These episodes create a sense of dislocation: the war is happening elsewhere, and the lone rider moves through its aftermath, piecing together news. The structure of the narrative mirrors this—Giles often arrives after the action, hearing reports of what the Rangers did.

Voice: The Reluctant Chronicler

Giles's prose is direct and unadorned, but it carries a consistent note of reluctance. He calls himself "a coward in the presence of suffering" and admits that he "steeled" his heart to ride on. He describes the wounded as "dying unattended hundreds of miles from home" and adds, with a bluntness that avoids sentiment, that "if they had stayed at home with their loved ones they would not be thus dying." This voice—self-aware, slightly defensive, unwilling to romanticize—shapes the entire account. Giles is not a professional historian or a boastful veteran; he is a man who promised to write something for a friend's family and is doing his best. The result is a narrative that often feels more like a personal letter than a regimental history, full of asides and admissions of imperfect memory.

Readers should approach this work as a memoir rather than a comprehensive history. Giles himself warns that his account is incomplete, and the text bears the marks of its origin: a request from a former comrade, written decades after the events. The value lies in the specific, often grim details—the sound of a horse on a battlefield, the smell of the dead, the loneliness of a rider lost in the dark. These moments, scattered through the campaign summaries, give the book its particular texture.

Reading Giles’s account of the Rangers, the weight of all those night marches and quiet aftermaths settles in slowly. It makes me think of another voice from that same long war, one that spent its hours beside a sickbed rather than a saddle. There is a particular tenderness in that other memoir, a different kind of waiting. Notes of hospital life from November, 1861, to August, 1863 — Edition Insights feels like the still, soft answer to all that movement.